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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dan3 who wrote (97282)	6/13/2003 4:12:35 PM
From: mozek	Respond to of 275872

Breaking with performant IA32 compatibility must have been a huge calculated risk at Intel, with the payoff being a shift in the industry to a new, proprietary Intel architecture. They must have spent some cycles considering what they'd do in a scenario like today. I wouldn't be surprised if they already had a basic solution that provides IA32 compatibility with minimal emulation, maybe something along the lines of what Jozef describes. If so, I'd bet the challenge is how to make that competitive, both in price, as it relates to die size / process required and performance necessary to avoid looking like a failed attempt. If they do IA32/IA64 chip, they will immediately have their 32 bit support benchmarked against Hammer and used against Intanium as a whole if it comes up short. As long as they can keep the Itanium benchmarks focused on 64 bit and MP tasks, Hammer gets mired in the 32 bit comparisons, diluting the message of its 64 bit value, while Itanium remains relatively decoupled, without the benefit or burden of performing well on today's software. My guess is that Opteron's performance surprised Intel. If they could have held a comfortable margin with their current IA32 chips, there would not be as much of an issue for them in their transition plan. That Hammer is both a better 32 bit solution as well as a rgeat 64 bit architecture means it's a real threat. If I were Otellini, I'd be working on two things, getting competitive IA32 compatibility into Itanium in a cost effective way, and working hard on getting as much software as possible to Itanium. Until I announced the former, I would actually use the lack of a bridge as another reason people should focus on the latter. The good news is that we're seeing strong support in software, which will provide some staying power for AMD as the battle moves to 64 bits. Long term, that's where AMD will need to really have and keep real momentum/volume and maintain competitiveness against the Itanium architecture. If they do, the industry will divide its software resources between IA64 and AMD64, and AMD will have stepped out of Intel's shadow completely, with a real chance of becoming a heavyweight. In the intermediate term, AMD's strategy looks like its working. Mike